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Pauline Kael, Provocative and Widely Imitated New Yorker Film Critic, Dies at 82

By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

Published: September 4, 2001

Pauline Kael, who expressed her passion for movies in jaunty, jazzy prose as the longtime film critic for The New Yorker, died yesterday at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. She was 82.

Ms. Kael was probably the most influential film critic of her time. She reviewed movies for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1979, and again, after working briefly in the film industry, from 1980 until 1991. Earlier, she was a film critic for Life magazine in 1965, for McCall's in 1965 and 1966 and for The New Republic in 1966 and 1967.

Enchanting her fans and infuriating her foes, rarely dull and often sharp and funny, with an intellectualism that reflected her background as a student of philosophy, Ms. Kael was never anything but outspoken.

Whether dismissing auteur theory, reviewing Robert Altman's ''Nashville'' (1975) before it was finished, questioning the extent of Orson Welles's contribution to ''Citizen Kane'' (1941) or proclaiming Bernardo Bertolucci's ''Last Tango in Paris'' (1973) as a cultural event comparable to the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's ''Sacre du Printemps,'' Ms. Kael was always provocative. Her seductive writing style bred a legion of acolytes, known as Paulettes.

The critic Louis Menand wrote in The New York Review of Books in March 1995: ''Kael was the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time, and she made it possible to care about movies without feeling pompous or giddy by showing that what comes first in everyone's experience of a movie isn't the form or the idea but the sensation, and that this is just as true for moviegoers who have been taught to intellectualize their responses to art as it is for everyone else.''

By the time she retired, Mr. Menand observed, she had produced a generation of inferior imitators. ''The manner of appreciation she invented has become the standard manner of popular culture criticism in America,'' he wrote.

Assessing her impact in a 1998 interview, Ms. Kael said: ''I think my influence was largely in style, not substance. Other critics sound like me because my writing has influenced them. They've rarely agreed with me about movies.''

At the same time, she deflected the question of whether her criticism had had any effect on films and filmmakers. ''I'd rather not say,'' she answered. ''If I say yes, I'm an egotist, and if I say no, I've wasted my life. Although I've been told I have influenced some people to become directors. Unfortunately, most of them are lousy.''

''You know, they talk about the golden age of the cinema as if it took place in the late 30's or in the 40's,'' she said in 1989. ''There was nothing personal and exciting in most of those movies. They were machine tooled. They were a lot of fun. But except for Preston Sturges and a few flukey individualists, they just didn't have the personal voice of the movies of the 70's.''

As a writer whose heyday spanned the years from ''Bonnie and Clyde'' (1967) to ''Awakenings'' (1990), ''Sleeping With the Enemy'' (1991) and ''L.A. Story'' (1991), Ms. Kael could mingle references to literary lions like Saul Bellow, Jean Genet and Norman Mailer with demotic condemnations like loony, sleazo, junk and bummer.

In a 1968 review in The New York Times of ''Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,'' a collection of Ms. Kael's reviews and articles, Eliot Fremont-Smith called her ''the most quotable critic writing; but what is important and bracing is that she relates movies to other experiences, to ideas and attitudes, to ambition, books, money, other movies, to politics and the evolving culture, to moods of the audience, to our sense of ourselves -- to what movies do to us, the acute and self-scrutinizing awareness of which is always at the core of her judgment.''

Reviewing ''The Sound of Music'' (1965) in treacle-curdling prose that reportedly prompted McCall's to dismiss her, Ms. Kael asked, ''Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get out on a stage?''